The Addon Junkie

But I totally told you so.

Bracelets have been hotfixed. Lovely charms no longer drop from kills obtained while in a vehicle.

After hours and what I can only assume to be tens of thousands of dollars worth of downtime, Blizzard finally called GeekSquad and a 16-year-old with an A+ certification and a GED asked them to try rebooting the servers. In any case, Tuesday maintenance turned into an all-day thing and we now have our WoW back… Just in time for me to go to work. Yay.

Apparently whatever they were hotfixing they broke things even worse. Players from nearly every realm are currently reporting that they cannot speak to NPCs or that they are experiencing such terrible lag that they might as well not try to speak to them. There are problems with the auction house, questgivers, and on a few servers the Outlands are completely devoid of life. Oh well, we can’t expect much from Blizzard I guess, I mean it’s not like they have millions and millions of dollars of income per month coming in to pay for skilled developers, engineers, and equipment to test things on before they take it live, right? RIGHT???

Anyway, I still blame the bracelets. I think all of the bracelet twinks, as I shall henceforth refer to them, have bogged down Blizz’s databases with such immense numbers of bracelets that the servers buckled under the load. The NPCs heard about what all the bracelet twinks did to the auction house, too, and now they’ve gone on strike. The denizens of the Outlands deserted entirely for fear that we would remember those bombing run quests where we killed like thousands of guys per run and start dragging out our alts.

Oh, and I haven’t had a chance to see if they fixed the bracelet bug yet because I can’t get into Ulduar and the questgivers at the Argent Tournament Grounds won’t speak to me. So I guess in a way the kind of did fix the bug didn’t they?

Many of you trying to log in right now are seeing something like this:

While delays are our regular Tuesday morning fare, we seem to be getting pushed back quite a while today. My guess? They’re hotfixing the bracelet bugs and it’s giving them more trouble than they bargained for.

What are the bracelet bugs you ask? Well as I mentioned briefly in the post accompanying my last video, while some of us were legitimately grinding for fun, profit, and lovely charms there were others who would saddle up their argent steeds or hop into one of the siege tanks of Ulduar and cheat their butts off. See, you don’t actually loot the charms, they just show up in your inventory when you successfully kill something. The effect still triggers if you’re on a vehicle and so some people have been plowing legions of skeletons beneath their hooves or mercilessly slaughtering armies of Ulduar’s dwarves. A quick test I performed last night shows that the exploit will produce in ten minutes time the same number of charms it took my fiancee and myself an hour and a half to grind last night. I haven’t heard anything official regarding whether Blizzard actually considers this an “exploit” in the bannable sense, but in one forum post, Marlan from the Silver Hand server sums it up more concisely than I ever could: “As a general rule, if your conscience is nagging you that something might be bad enough to write a forum post on it, you may want to consider not doing that thing just to err on the side of caution.”